


Duels in the Dark

by melannen



Category: Machineries of Empire Series - Yoon Ha Lee
Genre: (sort of, Other, Platonic Life Partners, Sort Of, THERE WAS ONLY ONE BED, characters watching porn of themselves, five things fic, less-than-canon level mentions of trauma rape abuse torture genocide violence etc., self-insert reader fic, sort of-, sort of--, sort of., terrible media, what would that even mean in this fandom anyway)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-18
Updated: 2020-12-18
Packaged: 2021-03-10 19:47:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,120
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28142595
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/melannen/pseuds/melannen
Summary: Every Kel cadet went through a General Jedao phase. Usually it was around the end of their first year at the Academy, when what it meant to be Kel really hit them. Cheris's came later.(Or, five Jedaos that Ajewen Cheris shared a bed with.)
Relationships: Ajewen Cheris & Garach Jedao Shkan, references to past jedao/khiaz
Comments: 8
Kudos: 31
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	Duels in the Dark

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Ahsurika](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ahsurika/gifts).



Every Kel cadet went through a General Jedao phase. (Maybe Shuos cadets did too, but Cheris didn’t have the data on that.) Usually, from her experience tutoring them in math while they were in the throes of their enthusiasm, it was late in the first or early in the second year of the Academy, when they first studied the fabulous victory at Candle Arc at the same time the reality of formation instinct started to hit them, and it was hard not to think about the most famous crashhawk of all, and wonder what could have made him into what he’d become (never mind that he hadn’t even been Kel at all, really.)

Cheris’s Jedao phase had come later. She’d flattered herself that she’d come into the Academy with a better idea of what it meant to be Kel, to be the first defense of the Hexarchate, than most of the other cadets, after years of tutoring by the servitors. She’d run up against him in her fourth year, when the advanced tactics of calendrical terrain class came back around to his battles, including some of the _less_ famous ones. She’d kept analyzing his choices as a general and running up against the fact that they were so often _almost_ ideal, _very nearly_ the perfect solution.

The instructor had humored her as far as letting her do her capstone project on the Severed Hands campaign, and tolerated Cheris sitting in their office after hours, saying, “But if he’d waited six and one-twenty-fourth hours before moving, and shifted the formation by about six degrees, he’d have been coming in with the calendrical terrain on his side and a perfectly-timed spike when the battle finished. Instead they were neutral at best, and if he’d lost even a few more moths, he would have ended up reinforcing the heretical calendar!”

The instructor had sighed. They had probably sighed at many Kel cadets over the years in exactly the same way, Cheris had thought. “Cadet Cheris,” they had pointed out. “That alternate solution wasn’t in the text.”

“No,” she’d agreed, “But if you look at the details of the battle, it’s obvious.”

“It’s obvious to you,” the instructor said, sounding tired. “Not to everyone. General Jedao was Shuos, not Kel, and definitely not Nirai or Rahal. He won the battle with Shuos tactics, not Rahal. We study him in this class because even the best Kel general is well-served by understanding something of the way Shuos think.”

Then they’d set Cheris to read a couple of monographs analyzing the calendrical tactics at Candle Arc. Which, yes, she knew he’d won that battle partly by out-thinking the Lanterner general, who had been _too_ focused on calendrical terrain, and the expense of overlooking Jedao’s advantages of invariant terrain; that was first-year stuff.

But it wasn’t that Jedao sometimes looked beyond calendrical considerations. And it wasn’t that Cheris could see solutions that less-mathematically inclined officers might miss: Cheris knew that the Nirai had wanted her; that by Kel standards, at least, she was a genius. And Cheris knew that this could be a problem for her as much as an advantage. But there had been Kel generals who were masters at calendrical tactics; there had been even more of them who had been well-served by Nirai or Rahal advisors. It wasn’t that Jedao wasn’t a genius there like everywhere else; it was that he kept _almost_ getting there, missing the perfect calendrical nexus by three degrees and less than two hours. It bothered her. He’d won Candle Arc handily despite being outnumbered eight-to-one - but there was a point in the battle where a slightly more aggressive move would have given him a calendrical spike that not only would have given him terrain advantage, it would have cemented High Calendar control over Candle Arc for a generation. And the battle had been all but won at that point; it wouldn’t have been a drastic risk. Instead he’d paused the battle for seven minutes, which had not only lost that chance, it had interfered with the existing Broken Feet remembrance strongly enough that they’d had to add a temporary Candle Arc one to compensate.

For a flashing minute she’d wondered if he’d done that deliberately - if his treason had started earlier than anyone knew - but even if it had been deliberate sabotage, he could have paused for 8.42 minutes instead of seven, which would have forced the Candle Arc remembrance into a higher prominence and destabilized the remembrances to either side of the calendar as well. Or he could have taken the opportunity to spike, but botched the calendrical gradient just enough to send it laterally, which would have induced a slow rot in the system in that entire reach (Cheris didn’t think her instructor was aware of that possibility, and she was smart enough not to point out that she’d seen it.) Not to mention what he could have done with the Rahal lensmoths, if he’d really wanted to.

It was like that with every one of his battles; there was nothing blatantly wrong with the calendrical tactics - and combined with the invariant tactics, they added up to genius - but there was always something he just missed that would have gone beyond genius to brilliance. It would have taken skill beyond Cheris’s to be just exactly that wrong every time on purpose, and why would he want to even if he could? She was less than twenty and needed to understand.

Eventually she’d found herself in the Academy reading room, just like all those first-year cadets, reading through everything they had on General Jedao, and then putting it down, frustrated. Nothing Kel Academy had to offer explained what was bothering her. Nothing Kel Academy had, to put it bluntly, explained General Jedao at all. What she had figured out was that part of Jedao’s genius, part of the Shuos gamesmanship behind everything he did, was to try to understand the person behind the tactics, not the tactics themselves. She had to understand Jedao himself to figure this out. And whatever she was missing, she hadn’t found it in the official histories - and she knew how the Hexarchate worked enough to know that she wouldn’t find anything else at Kel Academy.

On her next leave she’d gone down to the dome city, dressed up like a civilian, and found the antiques district. She hadn’t gone downside since her breakup with Orua, but Orua liked dangerous things - that’s why she’d dated Kel cadets- and had known about a dusty, cluttered shop with a stock of very old dramas, most of it stored on obsolete cartridge formats, the kind that censors wouldn’t have bothered with even if they could have known it was still there. She’d decided she was looking for media about General Shuos Jedao from his lifetime. From before Hellspin Fortress. From the years when people had been fascinated by trying to understand General Shuos Jedao, the master tactician who had never lost a battle, duelist and whiskey connoisseur. Not Jedao the traitor, not after Hellspin had overshadowed everything else about his life. She’d thought that maybe that would at least help answer her questions about his tactics during his successful pre-death career - which, at the time, she’d thought was more interesting than his downfall or his (all highly-classified) battles after .

The elderly alt shop attendant had recognized her. “I was wondering when I’d see you back here,” they’d said, smiliing. Probably Cheris was far from the first Kel cadet who’d had this idea in her Jedao phase, too, and it’d been enough that she’d been mildly embarrassed while she’d looked over the selection of holo-dramas of the kind that had been trendy eight hundred years ago and were considered desperately tacky these days. All fictionalized, of course, but she hadn’t expected anything else.

She’d been to embarrassed by the attendant’s knowing look to linger over them, so she’d quickly picked a drama called “Duels in the Dark” where the main character was supposed to be a high-ranking Shuos on a visit to General Jedao’s command moth, and the summary implied a lot of exhibition duelling, which she’d figured would be interesting even if the rest of it was a bust. The publication date placed it right after the end of the Aughen campaign, which was when a lot of General Jedao’s most interesting tactical battles had happened, despite the flashier tricks he’d used with the Lanterners.

The attendant had winked and told her she’d made a good choice, and then rented her the converters she’d need to view it, which cost her more than the cartridge itself.

After dinner in a hotel room she’d set it up, and put on the clunky headset that was supposed to give an “immersive dramatic experience”. Cheris wasn’t sure what was wrong with watching on a screen, but maybe 800 years ago the headset had some novelty value.

It dropped her right onto the flagship, and that was when she realized “immersive” meant not just panoramic 3D, but a camera angle that put her into the first-person POV of the person playing the Shuos assassin-administrator. Awkward. They were on the bridge of what was probably supposed to be a vintage warmoth, although even 800 years out Cheris could see all the gaps in the set-dressing. Jedao welcomed her onboard warmly as “Shuos Yournamehere,” at which point Cheris realized she probably shouldn’t have skipped the entire customization menu.

The Jedao in the drama - he looked reasonably similar to the few images she’d seen of the general in history books; they must have gone for some kind of animation overlay instead of casting an actor famous enough to carry the part with his own face - apologized that they were still repairing battle damage, and asked if she’d like a tour of the ship while rooms were prepared.

Her POV’s voice was graciously agreeing before Cheris had thought it through - so “Immersive” didn’t mean “interactive”, anyway; she’d be following a set script on rails.

Following up on the promise of the cartridge’s case, they ended up in an empty dueling hall after a very quick tour past a ready room and a high hall, and the actor playing Jedao asked if she was interested in duelling.

Cheris knew that Jedao had been famed as a duelist when he was alive, although very few records of his actual duels survived. She hoped she’d get a chance to see some of his strategy here. Shuos though that games taught you all about a personality; Kel would rather duel.

She didn’t get that here.

Her character simpered about not having ever used a calendrical sword, in a way that felt more like a courtesan than a Shuos assassin, and not an Andan-trained courtesan either. Jedao’s actor brought her a training sword and showed her how to hold it and activate it. It wasn’t the way she’d learned dueling in her first year - it seemed to have a lot more focus on achieving exactly the right stances, early on, even if that mean moving her arms into position manually - but it was interesting to see what dueling had looked like, 800 years ago from an outside perspective.

They’d just gotten set up for an actual practice fight when everything went black.

Cheris thought for a second that something had gone wrong with the expensive cartridge-reader she’d rented, but a Kel functionary had come into the hall with an armload of emergency candlevines and explained that there had been an issue with the repairs and the moth was down to minimum life support only, and they were recommending all personnel not involved with the repair be confined to quarters until full life support was back on. Jedao approved the order, and then turned to her.

“Your quarters aren’t ready yet, I fear,” he’d said with that famous drawl, as he’d wrapped a candlevine around her shoulders. “I don’t suppose you’d keep me company in mine?”

On a modern command moth, that kind of power failure would have interfered with variable layout, and according to her Academy drills, standard procedure would be to shelter in place. The drama was set before variable layout, though. Maybe they hadn’t had full emergency lighting on warmoths 800 years ago either. The General’s quarters were suspiciously close to the dueling hall, but she supposed narrative convenience could serve the function of variable layout in a pinch.

The general’s quarters were hard to see by the light of two emergency candlevines, but she could make out a fair amount of space, and what was probably a large bed, and a mirror that reflected back the candlevines’ light.

“I’m afraid there won’t be anything very exciting to do here in the dark,” the General drawled.

“Do you remember what we used to do in the dark, in our Academy days?” Shuos Yournamehere replied. “I found that exciting enough.”  
“How could I forget?” he replied. “I was wondering if you remembered,” and then he started _taking off his gloves_.

Cheris suddenly realized exactly what kind of drama this was and tore off the headset. She was half-embarrassed it had taken that long that long for her to realize - in retrospect even the title was shatteringly obvious - and half embarrassed at what the shop attendant must have thought of her.

In her defense, it hadn’t occurred to her even once, before that moment, that General Jedao - the arch-traitor, the Immolation Fox - _fucked_. Much less that people had made bad porn dramas about him. Or that people had ever wanted to watch them.

 _She_ certainly wasn’t going to. A, he was a mass-murderer; B, he might not have been technically Kel, but close enough; and C, he was a man. Yuck, yuck, yuck.

She pulled up her essay on Severed Hands - which she was theoretically working on this weekend - and reworked her thesis to _not_ require her to think too hard about General Jedao. Taking off his gloves. In a dark room with only one bed.

She dropped off the cartridge and headset the next morning, red-faced, and didn’t even ask for her deposit back, and that was the end of her Jedao phase. By the end of the semester she’d outgrown the phase where she assumed she could out-think her instructors; and by the end of her first year of active service she’d outgrown the phase where she bothered to put down any mysteries of a Kel general’s orders to anything but incompetence and mismanagement. That was the Kel way.

But she couldn’t help thinking of "Duels in the Dark", many years later on the endless-feeling trip to the Fortress of Scattered Needles, in the ridiculously oversized command quarters of a real warmoth, after an evening spent watching bad dramas with the real (real-ish. Fully interactive, at least) General Jedao looking back at her cheerfully from the mirror, sitting on the bed. The only one bed.

“Have you ever watched any of the dramas based on your life?” she’d asked him, trying to distract herself from the long-forgotten memory of his (the actor’s) hands on her waist, positioning her for a beginner’s duelling stance, and comparing it to her practice that afternoon, the intangible bleedthrough of his reflexes guiding her too, only immeasurably better and immeasurably more intimately.

“I haven’t heard of any dramas that _are_ based on my life,” he drawled. “Not recognizably, anyway.”

“The ones that are supposed to be based on your life,” she’d conceded.

“No,” he’d replied “And also, fuck no. I’m not actually _that_ kind of masochist.”

It was extremely unlikely that "Duels in the Dark" would be available in the _Unspoken Law_ ’s media library, even if he did deserve it after the mind games he’d been playing with her for the last week. But even if she could find something similar, she wasn’t sure it would be worth having to watch it herself. Although maybe she could put it on while she was sleeping, so he’d have to watch it and she wouldn’t--

“Have you?” he asked, with an odd gleam in her eyes.

“Once,” she answered. “It was terrible.” Everything else aside, it had been. “Currently my second biggest regret in life. Good choice not to watch them. Maybe you are a genius after all.”

Later again, in the even more haunted command quarters on the _Hierarchy of Feasts_ , with Jedao wound into her more intimately than she could have imagined even on _Unspoken Law_ , she found "Duels in the Dark" again. Someone must have dug it up as part of the glut of Jedao-related media that had appeared after Scattered Needles - maybe it was one of her distant allies trying to be helpful, Mikodez trying to drown out her propaganda broadcasts with nonsense, or just the Andan reacting to demand.

The drama had been remastered for a modern display. She couldn’t tell if it was Cheris or Jedao or just the unholy amalgam of both who had become more masochistic in the interim, but she lay back against the head of Khiruev’s bed and put it on.

Part of the remastering had been abandoning the conceit of the first-person POV. It had also involved some changes to that character, which she realized only when “General Jedao” bowed and greeted the guest not as “Shuos Yournamehere” but “Shuos-zho”, with the old honorific for the heptarch. Someone had done their research.

Every particle of her quivered into a horrible conditioned mix of dread and arousal as the camera swung around and showed - not Khiaz. A man. A slender, dark-skinned man, and she remembered out of a dream that for nearly a generation now, that had been everyone’s image of a Shuos who could hold the seat of power. Not Khiaz. Not like Khiaz at all.

And it clearly hadn’t been Mikodez who authorized the release of this drama, she thought, as the Shuos-zho character was simperingly coaxed into holding a practice sword just like in the original. He was known for a whimsical sense of humor, but she didn’t think it was that kind of humor. And they hadn’t taught dueling that way in Jedao’s day either - well, they had, as she suddenly remembered from an interesting afternoon with Ruo at the Academy - but not when the goal was to actually teach someone to use a sword.

When they got to the dark room with the one large bed, and Jedao slowly took off his fingerless gloves, she didn’t turn it off this time. She didn’t fast-forward either. Ten years of age and 800 years of extra cynicism made the difference. They were certainly past any squeamishness about hawkfucking or men at this point (the mass murder was still under negotiation.) And it helped that there were two men onscreen, and only one of them was supposed to be her. A little more distance. Maybe little enough more that it wouldn’t hurt when he referred to the man as “Shuos-zho” again, and kissed him bare-handed.

Actually, it turned out to hurt not at all. Whoever had dug up that old bit of scandal about Jedao and the heptarch clearly hadn’t figured out anything else about Jedao’s tastes. She almost ended up giggling as the heptarch called him “General” and told him how much he admired Jedao’s air of command, especially in the bedroom.

The porn itself was vanilla and soft-core, and the lighting stayed dim - even Cadet Cheris, who’d never seen a penis in real life up to that point, could probably have made it through if she’d gotten past the gloves. Right now she couldn’t get past toppy Jedao, not even offering to kneel _once_ , taking charge in bed like nothing could be more natural for him. Ruo would have been in hysterics - Ruo would have loved this. And probably had them roleplay it later, with Ruo as the general. 

She left it on to play. Remembering Ruo like this hurt, but she’d rather remember Ruo than Khiaz.

The lights came back up just in time for a money shot (of course) and then they ended up back at the dueling hall - apparently there were no more important duties for the General after a major disruption than play-dueling with a visiting heptarch. This time they had an audience, too, bleachers full of attentive Kel.

The dueling was still deeply inaccurate, of course, and she could see where modern dueling techniques had crept into the choreography - they must have re-shot the whole scene in the remaster. The dark-skinned heptarch made a creditable showing, enough that it was clear he’d been faking his inexpertise in the first scene, but Jedao still won.

Definitely wasn’t one of Mikodez’s propaganda pieces then, if Jedao won the duel.

Much later, after she knew both Mikodez and his sense of humor much better than she’d ever wanted to, she was a lot less sure of that.

Then she found herself trapped, once again, in a confined space with Jedao; the teenage-not-teenage Jedao who had been pulled from Kujen’s warmoth, and had escaped from the Citadel of Eyes desperate for any dregs of his old memories. There wasn’t room for three on the needlemoth, and she wasn’t inclined to give him anything. She couldn’t seem to help flaying him every time she interacted with him. She wasn’t sure if she hated him so much because of what he’d done to Dhanneth, or because she hated every Jedao that much, or because the Jedao in her hated _himself_ so much. Or just because she knew deep down that neither of them could afford to give him anything but pain, not until she could give it all back, all of the towering centuries of pain she’d learned to swim in. Or because he was actually a horrible creature of writhing tendrils and the void - but right then he was a boy in a broken man’s body, wrapped in a Mwennin quilt and sitting on a bunk and offering her a vulnerability.

“I looked up dramas about my life,” he said. “On the Citadel.”

“Did you learn anything useful?” she asked, not looking away from the moth’s controls.

“I learned not to watch dramas about my life,” he said.

“I have one on the needlemoth’s storage, if you want to watch it,” she said. “It’s called 'Duels in the Dark'.”

“Why,” he said, looking at her with pained dark eyes. “Why do you have _that one_ in storage?”

“Watching historical dramas for education, were you,” she said, and watched him flush. Good for him.

They were on a free moth together, later. It had offered them its empty commander’s quarters for the trip, and they’d shrugged and accepted.

There was only one bed, of course. But after sharing all those years of beds with him in her head, and then the two tiny bunks on the needlemoth, Cheris couldn’t find a reason to care. She didn’t know what Jedao was thinking. It was still a novelty to have the option.

Her brain - scrambled and unscrambled as it was - seemed to still have its issues. Seemed to have _associations_ with lying in command quarters on an old warmoth, for the first time next to a physical Jedao whose body actually dented the mattress. When Jedao’s panic woke her, later in the night, gasping and broken, it was from her dream set in a duelling hall in an old heptarchate voidmoth, fuzzy but without any urgency. Jedao’s dream had been less pleasant.

“Khiaz,” he gasped when she woke him. The Khiaz dreams were less gruesome than the later horrors, less wrenching than the earlier ones, but they always seemed to strike deep in a different way. 

She didn’t have an answer for him - she never had, even when they were her dreams - so she sent him, through the link, her memory of "Duels in the Dark", of ersatz-Jedao bowing to the dark-skinned heptarch, brought to the surface by her dream.

He stared at her, and then collapsed into washed-out laughter. “You _watched_ that?” he said.

“In my defense, I was nineteen,” she said.

“ _I_ watched that!”

“In your defense, _you_ were nineteen,” she pointed out.

“One thing at least we have in common, then,” he said, and looked across the bed at her.

“What a thing to expose innocent young people to,” she said dryly.

“How did you ever stumble across that as a cadet?”

“I went to an antique store and asked for Kel history,” she said. “It was the only thing they had about you. And there were duels.”

“Well,” he said, and “Well. A cheerful thought. If the universe ever decides to be kind, maybe in another eight hundred years that will be the last thing remembered of me.”


End file.
